Financial services workers: paying for it

As membership has dropped drastically since the crash, the unions have no option but to ditch partnership and fight, argues GREGOR GALL

Protesters calling for banking reform at a rally to mark the 10th anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the financial crisis, outside the Royal Exchange building in the City of London

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

Ten years ago this month, the collapse of Lehman Brothers was the first thunderclap of what would become the storm of the great financial crisis of 2008-2009. The first rumble to be heard was of the panic around subprime mortgages in the United States.

The contagion spread to Britain, with the first run on a bank in one hundred and fifty years happening. This was Northern Rock. It was “nationalised” along with some other building societies and Royal Bank of Scotland and LloydsTSB. Barclays only avoided needing a government bailout due to securing questionable loans from Qatar.

The contagion spread into the wider economic system in Britain, with the credit crunch giving way to a financial crash and then a recession and that recession then gave way to an age of austerity in public spending and welfare which we are still living with today.For a crisis that started in the financial services sector and for a sector that was affected more by the crisis than any another, relatively little is known about how it has affected the workers in this particular sector of the economy.

That is why I researched and wrote Employment Relations in Financial Services: an exploration of the employee experience after the financial crash. I examined the processes and outcomes by which workers in the sector have been made to pay for a crisis and a calamity not of their own making. The book examines their working conditions and experience of work and employment.It is a very sorry tale of continual redundancies, unpaid overtime, below-inflation pay rises and ever more oppressive management techniques. Financial services sector workers are now working longer and harder for less in real terms. Indeed, those left in the sector can be seen as the most unfortunate ones because they are the ones having to pick up the pieces and do more with less. My book analyses these outcomes in terms of flight, fright, fight and falling-in-line.

There has been a massive amount of flight, fright and falling in line but, unfortunately, sparse evidence of any fight. Hundreds of thousands have left the sector as result of voluntary severance packages. The fear of redundancy is one of the main factors which has resulted in workers experiencing fright. Another is performance management systems whereby individual workers’ pay rises are determined by managers’ assessments. In this system, underperformance leads to a not so polite invitation to leave the organisation. Some have referred to this as “being managed out the door.” The result has been a falling in line of workers chasing their tails to meet their ever-growing number of targets.

Ironically, partnership working between unions and management in the sector has survived the financial crash even though the companies have ceased to negotiate with the unions, merely consulting with them now. It’s been a difficult situation for the unions. Unable or unwilling to mobilise their members, membership has fallen in a self-reinforcing and downward spiral. Union density has fallen in the sector from 22 per cent in 2007 to just 13 per cent in 2017.

Other than partnership working not equipping unions well to fight rapacious employers, the other main lesson we need to learn is that the aforementioned banks were not, in fact, “nationalised.” They were bailed out with public money and private managers, not public servants, left to run them. If they had been nationalised, it is likely much of what finance workers had suffered would not have taken place in these banks.

Only full and proper state regulation of our financial and economic systems can prevent such a calamity from happening again. But it will also need state intervention in employment matters to protect workers’ interests and to support the creation of stronger unions to help in doing so. The only credible proposal to do this comes from Labour led by Corbyn and McDonnell.

Gregor Gall is professor of industrial relations at the University of Leeds.

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Thoughts of Time?

You may reflect on how the masses were subjugated by warrior bands and armies, how their leaders appointed themselves as kings and gave their friends positions of favour and authority.

How they are still subjugated today?

How many days a week do you work for the ‘state’ and how many for yourself?